Crossing To Safety Quotes
"Life chastened us so that now we lie waiting to die, or walk on canes, or sit on porches where once the young juices flowed strongly, and feel old and inept and confused."
"In its details, that dinner party was not greatly different from hundreds we have enjoyed since. We drank, largely and with a recklessness born of inexperience. We ate, and well, but who remembers what?"
"What the disorderly crave above everything is order, what the dislocated aspire to is location."
"Any pushing of any doorbell button is as rich in dramatic possibility as that scene in Chekhov when, just as the Zemstvo doctor’s only child dies of diphtheria and the doctor’s wife drops to her knees beside the bed and the doctor, smelling of carbolic, takes an uncertain step backward, the bell sounds sharply in the hall."
"The heart of it was the two people who had prepared the occasion, apparently just to show their enthusiasm for Sally and me."
"Crept? Rushed. Coming from meagerness and low expectations, we felt their friendship as freezing travelers feel a dry room and a fire."
"She chants out of a remote time with the clang of bronze in it."
"I want to drown in good salt water, I want my body to bump the pier."
"I’m not sure I’ve got what it takes to be a good teacher."
"Don’t tell me any more, I couldn’t take it in."
"I won’t really believe I’m Cinderella otherwise."
"I finished my novel during that stretch, revised it between Ottawa and the St. Lawrence, and threw it away going up the Richelieu."
"Instead, I recited all the poems I knew, from 'Lycidas' to 'The Shooting of Dan McGrew,' doing my best to recall them without error from beginning to end."
"By the time I ran dry I was at Rouse's Point, at the upper end of Lake Champlain."
"At Rouse's Point they ransacked the car—trunk, back seat, front seat, under the seats."
"The Johns-Manville houses had been replaced by clap-boarded farmhouses leading through staggered sheds to big barns."
"My eyes had sash weights on the lids, the road forked where there were no forks and curved where there were no curves."
"We must rise and follow her, Where from every hill aflame She calls and calls each vagabond by name."
"Nothing could do as much for a man as a good long jail sentence."
"All life should be like the three weeks that followed."
"Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature."
"Events will transpire. I will win the Pulitzer Prize. We will sell a lot of copies."
"It felt like a purification before the next fateful, hopeful chapter of our lives."
"You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone."
"An indefinite awkwardness settled like pollen on the porch."
"His wisdom comes off the air as a slurred stammer."
"You have to read his books and articles to know how bright he is."
"Moe, I love you, but if you keep offering me a gentlemanly arm I’m going to fall on my face."
"Puttering can be a comfort. It goes with rumination, and he’s a ruminator."
"She makes the independence of a hog on ice look timid and tentative."
"If there’s ever an iron shortage, we’re ready."
"We’re all decent godless people, let’s not be too hard on each other if we don’t set the world afire."
"She’s always either cleaning something up or sharpening something—pencils, tools, whatever she can find that needs it."
"That, if you can get away with it, is a very satisfactory way to live."
"Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world."
"We were no lost generation, despite our losses."
"Living through what we had been given to live through, we had only bad luck or personal inadequacy to blame for our shortcomings."
"I lived now in a pensione named for the man who had given America its name."
"You were not made to live like brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge."
"It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It’s all of it not true, and it’s all of it true."
"Learning was a ladder to respectability and stability, to all that his childhood and youth had lacked."
"We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in."
"Every tree and bush—most of which he had planted forty years before—seemed as real a part of his being as his own internal organs."
"If you can’t be born to a place where you can stay, then make one—or two."
"Silence begins to fall on these woods, and as silence falls, little flames of red and yellow begin to lick up out of the green."
"They mought of killed us but they ain’t whupped us."